


More than Country (More than God)

by togina



Series: Howling Commandos [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Period-Typical Slurs, WWII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-09
Updated: 2015-12-09
Packaged: 2018-05-05 20:07:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5388602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are men, the Commandos know, that you can trust at your back.  (And there are perverts that you want to keep far, far away.)  The problem is: what if they're the same man?</p>
            </blockquote>





	More than Country (More than God)

**Author's Note:**

> From foxfireflamequeen's tumblr prompt, [here](http://toli-a.tumblr.com/post/134831727733/would-you-write-about-someone-or-multiple). This doesn't actually disrupt MCU canon, so it ends rather more happily than one might expect. But that doesn't mean that it isn't harsh, and that the Commandos' attitudes aren't true to their time. (And if you like this sort of thing, I'd recommend glitteratiglue's [the earth lives dimly in our bodies](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4741814).)
> 
> The title is from the comics "Always remember, more than God, more than country - it's the soldier next to him that he fights for."

It was Gabe who first noticed. Of course, it usually was: Gabe had avoided fights, in high school, had somehow gotten home walking through the white part of town and never once been hit. He knew how to pay attention to the set of a boy’s shoulders, the feeling in the air before someone got mad enough to take a swing. Some of the other boys at school had called him a coward—disappearing Jones, they snarled, trapped in a school without enough desks, trapped in Georgia without anywhere to go—but Gabe had shrugged them off, had gotten to Howard by keeping his eyes open and his trap shut.

He didn’t say anything, though. Before Azzano, he’d barely known any of the white men he was suddenly serving with, and he wasn’t about to make trouble. Besides, Barnes made sure that the rest of the unit didn’t _accidentally_ forget Gabe’s rations, at night, and Gabe figured there were worse things than sharing ammunition with a queer.

* * *

Timothy had run off to join the circus as soon as he could run fast enough that his uncle couldn’t catch him. He’d run off to Canada to join the RAF nearly as quick (the pay was better, in the military, and by 1940 Dum Dum was almost thirty years old and tired of sleeping next to Madame Mellifluous’s throwing knives), and somehow ended up in the 69th instead.

He’d started off with the acrobats, undersized for his age and quick on his feet. Quick to throw a punch, too, the first time the stage manager held back his pay, smirking as he suggested that Timothy come around the desk and _work_ for it.

There were plenty of inverts in the circus, but Timothy Dugan sure as hell wasn’t one of them.

Dugan got fewer offers, once he shot up two feet and over a hundred pounds—once his reputation as a ladies’ man got around (or his reputation for spitting at nancy boys who sashayed a little too close, for slugging any who decided to try their luck). Timothy’s mother might have been a drunk and his uncle might have been a bastard, but that didn’t make him any less of a real man. Dum Dum wasn’t picky about his dames, but he wasn’t a damned pervert.

Real men signed up for the war, and Dum Dum signed up with them. Met Barnes when they were already overseas, swapped into the 107th after a stint in a camp hospital put him too far from the 69th. The army was all mixed up, by then, Negroes and Orientals serving next to corn-fed boys from South Bend.

Dugan liked Barnes. The sergeant had a glint in his eye and a grenade pin between his teeth, ready to run down the hill screaming straight into the fight. These were the kind of men Dum Dum never got, in the circus: real men, ready with a lit fuse and a dirty story about their last girl.

Barnes didn’t tell many stories, but Dum Dum put that down to the fact that Barnes didn’t talk much at all. Man didn’t have to say much, if he was that good with a gun.

Jones had known all along, Dum Dum realized, once they were all locked up in the same room and Barnes’s pneumonia got so bad the bastard couldn’t make it to the latrine. The night Barnes had started flopping like a fish, delirious and more than half dead, they’d made Dum Dum sit on him to keep him still.

It was never quiet in the cells, and Barnes’s voice was so weak that only Dum Dum heard him beg. “No! Don’t hurt ‘im. I love him. _Stop_!”

But when Tim scrambled off—wanting to haul back and hit something and not wanting it to be a man already headed for the ovens—Jones was watching them both, his lips pressed together and his face perfectly still.

“Fuck,” Tim said, rubbing his hands on his trousers where he’d been holding onto Barnes’s flailing arms. The army wasn’t supposed to take inverts. The army was for real men—black or yellow or red, Dugan didn’t care, but real men fucked _dames_. “Fucking perverts,” he said, and spat. (But he spat on the cell floor. Barnes had saved his life at least twice, had handed Dugan his own Browning in their first fight when Dugan’s gun had misfired, had found Dum Dum three-men deep in a bar brawl once and _grinned_ , blood on his teeth and something half-wild in his pale eyes. Dum Dum hated queers . . . but he didn’t hate Barnes.)

* * *

There were of course _homosexuels_ , on the docks at Marseille. Jacques’s _maman_ had insisted they move, after his little sister was born—north, out of the narrow, tumbling alleys of the seaport and into a respectable home. North, away from the unceasing screech of the gulls, the bird shit and scratch of rats eating through the walls. North, away from the refuse of the sea (the men who’d been away from women so long they’d forgotten them, the women with thick paint on their faces and a sailor’s full pay in their brassieres).

Jacques had grown up on the docks, running errands for his father. He had learned to avoid the jetties where the trash piled up through the winter, just as he’d learned to avoid the _tasses_ that men would use to undo their trousers for far more than a piss. It was unnatural, and Jacques wanted no part of it, but there was plenty of shit on the docks that couldn’t ruin the taste of freedom in the sea air.

It didn’t mean he hadn’t joined the other boys, sometimes, blood running hot from a few sips of stolen brandy, itching for a brawl. The _tapettes_ made for easy targets, then, and Jacques could still feel the pain of a first punch shooting through his knuckles, seventeen and staring into the face of a boy no older than he was, trousers around his ankles and fear in his eyes.

By the time he met Barnes, the sergeant had been hollowed out, eyes sinking down into his sockets, cheeks flushed with fever but already caving in. He was a man marked for the camp hospital (marked for the grave). And yet, Barnes fought the pneumonia for weeks beyond what Jacques could have imagined, rolled slowly to his feet and rasped out a laugh, promised Dum Dum’s concerned frown that he’d seen worse odds in his life, and he’d be fine.

Jacques saw the way Jones and Dugan hovered, over Barnes. He’d seen plenty of men come through their cells, by October, plenty of comrades in arms. It took something more, to win the kind of devotion Barnes’s unit wore in their actions and in their eyes. (It took blind hope from all of them, to keep praying every morning that none of the bodies they carried to the ovens would be Barnes’s.)

It wasn’t until Captain America showed up that Jacques discovered what Jones and Dugan must have already known. Jacques could recognize devotion (he could recognize a boy’s terror, caught in an illegal tryst and too frightened to hide), but Barnes stared at their handsome savior the way Jacques had always stared at the sea.

It had been wrong, when Jacques was young—sodomy was a perversion of God’s will, and if there was no God, it was still an unnatural thing.

Then the Nazis had come to Marseille, with their goose step and their gold stars and triangles colored pink and green. They had looted his mother’s nice house, had shot his sister’s husband because he was out too late. And Jacques watched Barnes watch the blond man and thought of the Nazis tripping a slim man with a pink triangle sewn forcibly onto his shirt, grinding his face into the street (a boy, seventeen and scared, his trousers down and his blood on Jacques’s fist).

The Nazis believed that sodomy was wrong, was an abomination—and Jacques wanted nothing so fiercely as he wanted to be an abomination to the Nazis. He would burn every page of his _maman_ ’s Bible to win back Marseille (and he would join hands with the English, with the Jews and the gypsies and the homosexuals—with any woman or man who would help him to bring the Nazis down).

* * *

Falsworth waited until Rogers had left the table, before he said anything. He watched their new Captain walk away, and poured himself another full pint, and drank it so quickly he nearly drowned on the dregs.

“Glad to be back in England?” Dum Dum snorted, pounding Monty on the back with one meaty hand. “You’d better savor that beer, Monty, since we’ve just signed back up for certain suicide.”

“I think we need to tell him about Barnes,” Falsworth blurted out, coughing. Prison must have driven decades of good breeding right out of him.

Their table went quiet. Dugan wouldn’t meet his eyes; Jones wouldn’t look away. Falsworth didn’t look at Jones. He looked at Dernier, who was staring at the bar where their new Captain sat jawing with his friend. With their sergeant, Rogers insisted, and Monty had realized then that Rogers must not know.

Pansies. Monty had grown up around a whole horde of them, raised in the best public schools. His father claimed that homosexuality was destroying the aristocracy, too many limp-wristed boys and not enough men.

Falsworth had left Oxford early, to join the army.

Barnes was easy enough to spot, once Rogers had shown up to save them. Falsworth had spent years in school watching boys moon after Francis William, looking just as foolish as Barnes did on the march to camp. Falsworth had hated all of them, tripping over themselves to follow Francis down the halls, fumbling in the wake of Francis’s effeminate grace.

Barnes wasn’t like that. Falsworth had seen Barnes trip over his own shovel to distract their guards when Morita was too tired to work. He’d heard Dugan’s stories about how Barnes kept extra ammo in his pockets and a spare gun for his friends. Pansies were fine, as cannon fodder—but they didn’t belong on the Allies’ elite team.

Francis had lured his admirers into closets after curfew, in plain sight of anyone who bothered to look. Pushed them out again when he was done, their buttons askew, flushed with shame when they realized that Falsworth could see where they’d been. Francis always left a few minutes later, his hair smoothed back and his shirt tucked in, as though he’d ducked into the closet to freshen up and not to debauch another young boy.

When he realized he’d been caught out, Francis would only laugh at Falsworth’s scowl and give a little wave. Finally, Falsworth threatened to tell the headmaster, to have Francis expelled.

“Why,” Francis said, smirking, his head tilted so that his hair fell forward into his eyes. “If you wanted to have a go, James, you only needed to ask.”

Falsworth had broken Francis William’s nose for that, bruised his hand and nearly been suspended for fighting. He had stopped walking down the corridors at night; he kept his face turned away from the closet, and didn’t go to the ceremony when Francis finished at the top of their class.

“I wouldn’t say anything,” Falsworth added, slightly worried that Dugan would break _his_ nose. Plenty of Francis’s conquests had turned up in Parliament, after all, and Falsworth never gave them a second glance. “But it’s just us, now. Shouldn’t Rogers know the kind of men he’s putting at his back?”

* * *

Jim hadn’t even considered it, until they got back to base. After all, Sarge was _Sarge_. The first time he’d saved Jim’s bacon Sarge was hoarse with pneumonia, and could still wrestle Dugan for longer than the rest of them combined. Sarge had grown up right next to Lady Liberty, looked like Valentino and sang like Bing Crosby; he was as American as apple pie.

Even after they got back to camp—after Jim had seen Monty staring at Barnes, had heard Monty mutter, “Pansy,” and watched Dugan spit hard at the nearest tree—Jim wasn’t sure he believed it. Sure, Sarge kept eyeing Captain America, but they all were, trying to suss out the giant who’d parachuted into their graveyard and punched Hitler two hundred times.

They were all staring at Captain America, but Captain America was staring at Sarge.

Jim wasn’t sure the other guys were right, about Sarge, but he wasn’t sure that they were wrong. And it wasn’t fair, was it? Jim had fought his whole life to be American, had played football and learned to fix cars and yet he still got threatened in the street after word reached them about the Japs at Pearl Harbor. Jim could be the best American GI in Europe and it wouldn’t stop his own government from taking the house his grandfather had built, but Sarge could go out after dark to screw goats and no one gave a god damn.

Jim slammed his glass down a little too hard, after he finished his beer. “All right,” he shrugged, the anger tightening his hands. But he still wasn’t convinced. Cap was Sarge’s best friend—wouldn’t he know if Barnes was a fairy?

“Yeah,” Dum Dum grunted, either an agreement or a challenge. “Maybe you’re right, Monty. But no way in hell _I’m_ saying anything about it to Rogers.”

“About what?” Cap dropped back into his empty chair, a full pitcher of beer in each hand. “I brought you drunks another round. But I should warn you, Bucky says he’s going to beat reveille on a tin can at six tomorrow, maybe hire a brass band.”

Dugan winced—at the mention of Sarge or at the idea of reveille, Jim didn’t know—and Jim watched Captain America twist around just in time to catch a glimpse of Barnes’s dress uniform as he left the bar.

Jim wondered if any of the others had seen their Captain’s face fall.

* * *

Barnes knew how to disappear when the situation called for it. Gabe could admire that trait: knew it intimately, himself. The Commandos would have their say. They weren’t preachers, by any means, but there were men you could trust at your back and men that you couldn’t.

Of course, that didn’t mean it was a good idea to say so. Most folks didn’t want a Negro watching their back, or a Jap (even one from Fresno). The British didn’t trust the French, and nobody trusted a circus performer as anything but a con man. Who were they, to tell Captain America not to trust a queer?

Besides all that, Gabe could feel the air shift around Steve when he watched Barnes walk away. His leg started bouncing, and Gabe knew they had a limited amount of time before Rogers bounded out of the bar to follow his best friend. If a black man in Georgia called a white man queer, it wasn’t the white man who’d wind up dead. If Monty wanted to insult Barnes to their Captain, Gabe had a feeling it would end up burning Monty instead.

“What was it you wanted to tell me, Dugan?” Rogers asked, his smile sly. With his superpowers, he’d almost certainly heard Dum Dum insist that he _wasn’t_ telling Rogers.

Dum Dum kicked Monty under the table, but nobody said a word.

“The Nazis hate the homosexuals.” It was Jackie who finally spoke, hands clenched around his glass, ignoring them all to stare into his tepid beer. Dum Dum opened his mouth, but couldn’t think of anything to say and so left it hanging there, catching flies. When Jackie lifted his head his gentle brown eyes were hard. “I have room for only one enemy,” he announced, and Monty looked away.

Gabe doubted his new squad had noticed the way Captain America had gone perfectly still when Jackie spoke. No, he thought. No, this wouldn’t go well at all.

“Are _you_ going to bunk with Barnes, then?” Jim butted in, wading into the conversation fists first, a sneer curling the left side of his mouth. Even if you could trust a queer in battle, you didn’t trust them near your bed.

“What –” There was steel in Rogers’s tone, slicing through the silent arguments in everyone’s eyes. For the first time Gabe considered that this man could be their captain, as well as merely the craziest of the men. “- do you want to tell me?” He didn’t say, _about Sergeant Barnes_ , but they all heard it just the same.

“He burned camp to the ground for Barnes,” Jackie muttered in French, quiet so that only Gabe would hear. “They are fools, to think he would suffer anyone who means the sergeant harm.”

Gabe lifted his eyebrows in silent agreement and buried his misgivings in a long swallow of beer.

Monty scraped at the table with his thumb, the nail chewed down to the skin. “We think perhaps Barnes would prefer to go home,” he declared, each word enunciated and polished to the dull shine of Gabe’s boots in Basic Training.

Rogers leaned his chair back onto two legs, careful to keep his chin down and his arms loose at his sides. “Yeah?” he replied, far too calm. “Why’s that? He say something about Brooklyn to you boys?”

“Boom,” Jackie whispered, and Gabe didn’t know then that it would be a word he’d hear Jackie say hundreds of times, shouted in Polish forests and echoing through Hydra’s plants, alight with joy and not this weighted dread.

“No,” Monty answered their Captain, braver than Gabe had thought. He even lifted his head and looked into Rogers’s eyes. “But I imagine he would be more comfortable there, surrounded by the parks and public urinals he already knows.”

“Excuse me?” Captain America blinked at Monty, his words jerky with shock. The chair dropped back down onto all four legs. “What?”

“We thought you’d know,” Dum Dum chimed in, when it became clear that Captain America was genuinely surprised, and not gearing for a fight. “Barnes is queer, Cap. Do _you_ still want him on your team?” Jim snickered, and Dugan kicked him in the shin. “On the squad?” he amended, while Morita rubbed his leg.

“He—what?” Rogers’s whole body had settled forward, his forearms resting on his thighs, his mouth open as he tried to swallow what Dugan said. “ _What_?”

“We’re not telling anyone!” Jim threw in, glowering at Monty and Dum Dum and even their Captain, though Gabe wasn’t quite sure why. “It’s none of Phillips’s business what Barnes does. But it is yours, Cap,” he finished, shrugging. Jim would wear the exact same expression, the night he told Gabe that he’d better get his act together and propose. He would scowl at Gabe over a beer, lifting one shoulder and saying that Gabe would face hell for marrying a white woman, but that it was entirely up to Gabe as to whether or not Agent Carter was worth hell.

Rogers sputtered. “You think Bucky is—you think Bucky likes—he . . . _Queer_?”

“We know it,” Dum Dum corrected him, hands steady as he poured himself another beer. He gazed at the splash of weak beer against the rim of his glass for a moment, then set his shoulders and sighed. When he turned to look at Cap, his mouth was a thin line under his mustache, his eyes resigned. “Loves one of them, even. No guesses as to who.”

Gabe’s uncle had been a gambler. Dum Dum wore the expression of a man who had just bet everything on one roll, and was only waiting to see how it fell.

The chair toppled over, when Captain America leaped to his feet. “I have to go,” he said, swallowing hard. He started to turn, then stopped, bent down so that both his broad hands rested on the table, his blue eyes boring into theirs.

“The only reason you’re sitting here,” he told them, his voice low, “is that Bucky trusts you. Either you stick around and prove him right, or you make your way to the door.” He made eye contact with each of them, and none of the men at Gabe’s table shied away. “I’ll see you tomorrow at reveille.” Rogers offered them the barest hint of a smile—of forgiveness, for trespassing onto sacred ground—and then he was gone, an empty glass and a fallen chair left in his wake.

“Well, Monty?” Dum Dum questioned, slapping Falsworth hard on the shoulder and lifting his beer. “You sticking around?”

Monty shook his head, and the table stilled. Then he snorted and rolled his eyes, lifting his own glass to meet Dugan’s. “To having only one enemy,” he said, inclining his head toward Jackie’s unrelenting stare.

“One enemy,” Gabe seconded, tapping his glass against Jackie’s, reaching across the table to toast Monty and Dum Dum.

“And two queers,” Jim added, just in time for Gabe to choke on his first sip of beer.


End file.
